Cake with Strawberries

With the final strawberries of the season, I made this chocolate cake from Smitten Kitchen, Double Chocolate Layer Cake. It makes an amazingly tall and impressive looking cake, especially after you slice the two layers in half. I substituted strawberries for raspberries and made a vanilla cream cheese frosting. Inside the cake I placed two layers of strawberry filling and the center layer was frosting.

Overall I was pretty happy with it, though, in our family we have a classic birthday cake, the Black Magic Cake. While both cakes are made with coffee and oil, Smitten Kitchen’s cake came out with a courser grain of cake than the Black Magic. While the cake certainly wasn’t dry it just didn’t have the fine tenderness that my family has come to expect in a cake.

In the future I will go back to the Black Magic but use the fruit filling technique from SK. I decorated this cake with leftover strawberry filling and sliced strawberries. The drive across town and the summer heat did not leave it looking as beautiful as it had begun, but there are worse things than dripping strawberry juice.